Do not quality and efficiency require skills like high motivation and dedication to the respective matters in the production of goods and services.

Not necessarily - or, at least, only from a small minority who is in charge of the processes at some point. In my experience, most Germans today, especially the younger generations, "just do their job" and really only are motivated to do stuff in their free time. (Not unlike most people elsewhere.)

Symbolic for the receding importance of precision in particular, in my observation, are for-the-wide-public and even half-professional technical writings (and TV reports/documentaries) - numbers are rounded, details left off, even confused or plain wrong, sources used without care. Just in my field, ironically, it's now the Spanish press releases that give say the length of a tunnel to be built down to the tenth of a metre and the costs to the last Euro-cent (literally!), while the German ones will round to the nearest first or second digit. The releases of the German Statistical Office are a much wider-reaching example.

I have observed at first hand

May I ask where you have been on a German university? What you describe sounds rather different from my own experiences, it could be because you have been to a conservative school and I haven't. (Come to think of it, I barely knew CDU supporters.) Alternatively, this could be a rebel-against-parents-but-adore-grandparents thing of the youth half a generation after me...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Aren't many of the innovations I listed examples of this free spirit?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Chris, the last US space crafts which did NOT suffer from continuous fatal (and tragic) system failures were developed by ideologically committed German Nazis. The same is true for the Soviet, now Russian, rockets. And why is it that German doors do really close? Have you ever driven a Chevrolet? Well, then you get the idea. Not that I didn't like to drive the Alfa Giulia. I enjoyed it. But it is better done when the sun shines. The same with my Moto Guzzi California motor bike. No rain please, or the electric wires go in tilt. German things are generally quite solid and realiable. Houses and public spaces are well heated in winter (the doors close). This also explains the cultural difference between Germans ordering cold drinks in pubs and the English warm beer drinking habit.

Germans work less because they can rely on a well functioning infrastructure.

Btw: Alfas are traditionally driven by cops and criminals.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819